SHARK

paper 0-06-440681-4 The latest installment in the thoughtful—though action-oriented—Wolfbay Wings series (Woodsie, 1997, etc.) moves away from the better members of the team to Sebastian, jokingly nicknamed Shark, one of the “Spaz Line” of players who are there to fill empty positions. His teammates have a lot of good-humored tolerance for poor players; what they won’t tolerate is that Sebastian is a rapidly improving player who won’t give up his safe place and give it all he’s got. The intelligence that informs the book is every bit as sharp as the action: As in the previous books, Brooks combines youth-sized attitudes and thoughts with parenthetical, often more sophisticated, musings on a wide variety of related subjects. He takes for granted the nobility and honor accorded the athletes, and demonstrates an easy, impenetrable respect for readers. Unlike the other entries in the series, however, this one has more philosophizing than action, and the sentence structure can be daunting: One sentence goes for nearly a page. It’s still a fast, compelling read, and several notches above anything else of its kind. (Fiction. 8-12)